Sunday, November 18, 2018

Welcome to another version of the post-apocalyptic US of A. This time around,
most of the country’s population has been decimated by monsters who find their
victims by sound. So now it’s time for everyone to finally shut the hell up. The
film is concerned with your typical white middle-class family unit, the Abbotts,
you might remember from all American movies ever. There’s mother Evelyn (Emily
Blunt), father Lee (John Krasinski, who also directs and co-writes the script),
deaf mute daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and youngest son Marcus (Noah
Juppe). There was an even younger kid, too, but he dies in the intro sequence in
a space shuttle toy related incident that still haunts the family, with
particularly Regan taking on most of the guilt for what happened.

The family has built themselves quite a nice little quiet fort out in the
country; they’re going to need it, too, for Evelyn is very very pregnant, and a
new-born isn’t exactly ideal when you’re threatened by sound-seeking
monsters.

I fear I’m starting to turn into one of those horrible curmudgeons that hate
everything that’s popular, for after finding little to praise about the
critically well loved Ghost Story, I’m also not terribly happy with
this particular flavour of the day in horror. In my defence, at least I love
Hereditary. However, let’s start with the positive: Krasinski sure
knows how to make a film look good, letting the – clearly brilliant – DP
Charlotte Bruus Christensen fill the screen with slick and gorgeous nature
shots, and also uses some sleek lighting once stuff becomes more outwardly
exciting to make things appropriately spooky. The sound design is pretty well
done too.

Unfortunately, all the film’s prettiness is let down by a script that’s just
not terribly interesting: if you expect a film that seems to so heavily
emphasise the death of the family’s youngest to actually have to say anything
but the most superficial and obvious about the death of a child, guilt and how
it threatens family relations, you’re out of luck. Or if you expect a film that
is this heavily about quiet to do very much with that, you might be confused
when quiet and quietness as an idea doesn’t even cross the film’s mind. Again,
it’s all surface-level monster-enabling survival stuff without any thought given
to the metaphorical strength of what their new world should ask of its
characters. But then, the film very consciously avoids anything that might take
any effort from its audience. Just for example, while this nominally is a film
with little dialogue, A Quiet Place still has its characters talking
nearly incessantly, using Regan’s deaf muteness as a convenient excuse to have
everyone babbling away in sign language all of the time.

Convenience really is the watch word for the film’s script. Clearly,
everything here is positioned to move everyone and everything as conveniently as
possible from one okay but not terribly exciting thriller set piece to the next.
So obviously the same family that builds a sound-proof box for their new-born –
and don’t even ask me about how plausible I think Evelyn’s pregnancy under the
circumstances is – and constructs semi-ingenious defensive and warning systems
for their farm doesn’t have a meeting place set up in case they are attacked and
separated, or manages to overlook a pregnant woman-threatening nail right in the
middle of their cellar stairs.

And isn’t it really convenient, too, that apparently nobody managed to find
out these hearing-heavy monsters are allergic against certain high sounds? And
that again nobody but our super family notices that the creatures’ fold-out
mouths might be the place to shoot them? And isn’t it, well, even more
convenient that the homebrew hearing aid Lee constructs for his daughter emits
exactly the right monster-hurting frequency?

Now, I’m well willing and able to roll with – or won’t even notice – this
sort of thing in a film that has other things to offer. Alas, A Quiet
Place’s empty prettiness and boring competence provides no way to avoid
everything that’s lazy about its script and empty about its conception.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

The Farthest (2017): I had heard great things about Emer
Reynolds’s documentary about the Voyager mission. Actually having seen it, I
find myself mostly annoyed by it. In theory, there’s an incredible richness of
material in here, interviews with a bunch of intelligent and important women and
men who were involved in one of the great achievements of human history, but
what the film does with this is pretty pitiful. Because its assumed audience are
apparently idiots who can’t follow a thought that’s longer than ten words, it
turns these highly intelligent people into talking heads out of a shitty “TV’s
Stupidest Awards” show, dispensing sound bites instead of thoughts. Add pretty
pictures, a cloying soundtrack, and a nearly desperate drive to entertain
instead of to enlighten, and you have your award-winning documentary right
there.

Proof (2005): As John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s
play proves, you can make things more accessible without making them
painfully stupid. Madden also mostly manages to turn the stage play into a movie
while neither ignoring the roots of the piece nor having the visual elements be
pure, functionless flim-flam. This features Gwyneth Paltrow (before her
unfortunate contemporary career turn into hawking crap to the gullible), Jake
Gyllenhaal, and Anthony Hopkins (actually acting instead of doing the shtick he
has frequently fallen back on after Silence of the Lambs) at their
best, working through the film’s complicated emotional and intellectual turns,
bringing its thoughts about family, mental illness, “Great Men” and their
daughters, and quite a bit more to life. Sure, from time to time things are a
bit mid-brow, please give us an Oscar, Hollywood (there’s an inadvertently
hilarious montage full of chin-stroking mathematicians you gotta see to
believe), Madden can’t get away from completely even in his best movies (let’s
not speak about that thing with Nicholas Cage), but the film’s stretching far
inside of these genre structures.

Summer Wars aka サマーウォーズ (2009): Because I am apparently a
curmudgeon today, turns out I’m also not quite as fond of this anime by Mamoru
Hosoda about a traditional, if crazy, Japanese family saving the world as the
rest of said world apparently is. It’s not that the animation isn’t beautiful,
or the character design doesn’t breathe warmth and love for these characters,
nor am I complaining about a lack of clever ideas. It’s just that this thing is
so incessantly emotionally manipulative, doing its damndest to squeeze the last
possible tear drop out of its audience that it rubs me all wrong, nearly
becoming a satire of the things it praises by the pure power of laying
everything on so thick and then ladling tears and good cheer on top. Honestly, I
felt slightly nauseated by it.

Friday, November 16, 2018

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only
basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were
written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me
in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote
anymore anyhow.

In the future, an intergalactic, inter-species fighting championship is held
in a shoddy looking space station. Since the contestants are kept on the same
physical level (except for things like size and number of limbs which won't ever
be important in a fight, no sir) by magicalscientific handicap
beams, a level playing field should be guaranteed for all. In truth, the
championship is in the hands of evil Rogor (Marc Alaimo for a change being the
evil boss instead of the evil boss's first henchman) who cheats, lies and sucks
the sportsmanship out of the sports wherever he can. Under these circumstances
it comes as no surprise Rogor's rude fighter Horn (Michael Deak) is the Champion
of the Universe right now, and there's no chance for the only honest trainer in
the universe, Quinn (Claudia Christian), to ever lead one of her fighter to the
title.

That is, until a series of complicated circumstances including a punch-up in
a Space McDonald's, an illegal space gambling den and the human's four-armed
buddy Shorty (Hamilton Camp doing his best Ernest Borgnine) turns Earthling
Steve Armstrong (Paul Satterfield in the beginning stages of anime hair) into
her main fighter. Steve is not just as pure-hearted as Quinn, but also, as it
turns out, the fighter who will once and for all lay the space sports rumour to
rest that humans can't fight. Even if he has to survive sex with and a poisoning
attempt by Rogor's (space, one supposes) girlfriend and (definitely) space
singer Jade (Shari Shattuck), and other evil plans of Rogor and his assistant
Weezil (Armin Shimerman) to get and win his title fight.

People who know me won't be at all surprised to hear that one of the few
movie genres that doesn't do anything at all for me is the sports film. Turns
out I don't care who can throw the ball hardest or kick his opponent in the
reproductive organs the most subtly, and find the whole ideological shtick of
these films rather unpleasant. Hell, I usually don't even enjoy tournament
martial arts films, unless they feature a yogi with retractable arms.

But put the sports film onto a space station and make most of the fighters
cute little alien freaks, and I get all excited. It seems as if the best method
to convince me the general silliness of sports movies is fun lies in
transporting them into even more silly space opera SF surroundings. And who am I
to complain about it, seeing as I get a very fun time out of it, at least in
Arena's case?

One of the best features of Arena is how serious it takes its own
silliness, with nary a moment going by where the film isn't decisively
not winking at its audience, even if winking would be the most natural
thing to do given the circumstances. However, delivering the weird and the silly
with a straight face is often the best technique to make it fun to a viewer
instead of just annoying. One doesn't, after all, go into a movie to witness how
much the filmmakers look down on their own work (and implicitly the audience
paying to see it). Here, the knowledge of the silliness of the film's basics is
taken as self-evident but not as a reason to half-ass anything.

In fact, half-assing is quite the opposite of Arena's way of going
about things. Instead, director Peter Manoogian (also responsible for the
awe-inspiring Eliminators), working for Charles Band when Charles Band
was still doing his best to be Roger Corman and not a puppeteer, scriptwriters
Danny Bilson (also responsible for a few other fine bits of fun low budget movie
writing before he became a videogame company suit) and Paul De Meo (Bilson's
long-time writing partner), and the usual Empire Pictures gang do one hell of a
job of piling weird, interesting and often funny detail upon weird, interesting,
and often funny detail. There might not have been much money going around, but
what these guys had, they put visibly on screen in form of a surprising number
of different aliens with actually different body types (no Star Trek "facial
lumps only” aliens here), sets that may depend on the audience's goodwill yet
are also built with love and effort, haircut and make-up crimes that make for a
distinctly 80s kind of future, and more sight-gags than anyone could notice in a
single session with the film.

Arena is the sort of movie that goes so out of its way when it comes
to creating its world (even if its is a very silly world), it even features two
pretty alien musical numbers for its not-all-that-alien singer Jade where most
films would have contented themselves with a mock swing number with synthies
instead of horns. The film isn't creating a believable future (not that it's out
to do that), but it sure builds a place out of cheap sets, concepts and ideas
plundered from Hollywood films of the 30s to 50s, pulp SF, and energetic
enthusiasm.

That the few fights the film contains aren't all that great to watch (it
seems Steve's fighting prowess consists in his ability to actually move faster
than a snail) isn't much of a problem in this context, for who cares about the
quality of the fights when everything else that happens on screen is so fun to
look at?

Thursday, November 15, 2018

aka (4) Nights of Horror
There’s little known outside of the Philippines about this early local horror
film. Apparently, the anthology movie of stories directed by Tommy C. Davis,
Larry Santiago and Pablo Santiago initially consisted of four stories, but the
first is lost to us now (apart from a bit of its credits) unless some heroic
archivist drags it up some day. Given how much of Filipino cinema made before
the 1980s or so is as gone as most of the films of the silent movie era here, I
wouldn’t hold out hope it’ll ever surface again.

So it’s an even greater pleasure that the other three segments of the film
still exist, even if it’s only in a beat up version that looks more as if it had
been shot in the 1920s than four decades later. In the case of Gabi ng
lagim, the bad state of the film material actually adds a bit to the first
two segments’ mystique, emphasizing the visual elements already related to
expressionist horror of the silent era just that decisive bit more.

Plot-wise, the first segment left to us concerns a very classically dressed
vampire leaving his bride in a peaceful Filipino village to do what vampire
brides are wont to do. She’s daylighting as a beautiful but reserved lodger in
the house of an older farmer and his kids, but by night, she’s taking care of
the parts of the population already rather overexcited by the mysterious beauty
living among them. She aims to finish on the farmer’s virginal daughter, though.
One hardly needs to mention there might be a teensy bit of a subtext about class
in form of the city/country divide and an expression of sexual anxiety very much
filtered through Catholicism going on here. It’s a fine piece of work in any
case, with a spirited vampire performance, and a lot of extremely moody shots of
graveyards and our vampiress prowling by night that contrasts nicely with the
segment’s naturalistic portrayal of country life.

The next segment is even better, for it concerns the ghost of a murdered man
taking his vengeance on the vile pimp who killed him; another man who looked on
and let the murder happen is exempt on religious reasons and because he thought
the victim was the actual vile pimp. That’s not how this stuff works in
Daredevil!

Despite my theological confusion, I am very fond of this segment. It has the
same mix of naturalism and expressionism as the first one, but it goes just a
bit further with the latter, turning the nights of the ghost-haunted characters
truly unreal. But let’s talk about the story’s most excellent ghost for a
second. He comes in two part: part one are his hacked off arms and hand floating
about, the second part is the – also floating – talkative rest of him, something
that really adds a folkloric feel to a creature whose motives could come
directly out of an EC comic. It also enhances the unreal aspects of the whole
affair further – there’s something strangely disquieting about these floating
arms, even though the special effects are primitive when looked at today.

About the final episode, the less said the better. A bunch of idiots run
through a haunted house while making the kind of jokes that had me thinking
fondly of Abbot and Costello; so true horror.

However, the middle segments are so strong even the last one can’t ruin
anything about Gabi ng lagim as a whole.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) and Red (Nicolas Cage) live absurdly peacefully in
a home in the deepest darkest forest. Both clearly have pasts of the complicated
kind - he, as it will turn out, the kind that teaches a guy how to forge a
battle axe that looks like abstract art or rather a lot like the Celtic Frost
logo (good taste) - but have found a place for themselves that looks like an
eternal now. This of course can’t last. The leader of one of those hippie murder
cults roaming all American backwoods, one Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), happens
to spot Mandy walking through the woods, and wants to possess her in all
imaginable ways and those you’d rather not.

So Jeremiah’s henchmen attack Red’s and Mandy’s home with the help of an
associated gang of mutant (it’s the drugs!) bikers; and when Mandy’s reaction to
being drugged, played Jeremiah’s bad self-written psych folk record and getting
shown his penis is to laugh, he does react rather like you’d expect by burning
her alive. The cultists leave Red for dead, which turns out to be a bit of a
mistake, for fuelled by what is clearly a returning alcohol habit,
hallucinations and visions of Mandy, drugs, and sheer bloody rage, the walking
wreck of a man slaughters his way up the mutant biker/cultist food chain.

I absolutely loved Panos Cosmatos’s first film, Beyond the Black
Rainbow, for its complete insistence on film as an aesthetic experience
instead of a plot-driven one, among other things. When it comes to this approach
to filmmaking, Cosmatos’s second feature Mandy continues on the path
the first film set. It is basically everything the first film was, but more
so.

So we get something in theory inspired by an early 80s exploitation movie and
heavy metal cover aesthetic that in practice looks and feels like no film or
album cover made in that era actually does, but rather like a fever dream
recollection of one, taking the idea of what this sort of film is and
does and intensifying it so much it becomes stranger and stranger – and these
films were often pretty damn strange already. That Mandy’s plot, such
as it is, is a series of clichés, but turned up to eleven again, is just the
logical conclusion to Cosmatos’s aesthetic approach; it’s also as beside the
point as a criticism as it is in my other great favourite example of a film
whose aesthetics and their meaning are the point rather than the plot or the
meaning the plot contains, Argento’s Inferno. A lot like metal or a
symphony, these are films best approached by experiencing them and viewing their
plots as frames to be filled with the visual, aural, etc elements that are the
actual things they are about. Which doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a lack of a
point or theme to the film, it’s just not made in the way many a viewer is still
most used to. At least to me, it is difficult not to see Mandy
as a film very concretely making visual the inner world of a man broken by the
loss of his wife, speaking through their private codes and shared artistic
preferences. Cosmatos, fortunately, never pulls the sort of “it was all a
hallucination” kind of reveal that would make this too obvious and too concrete,
understanding that your evil hippie cults and mutant bikers can very well be
real for the characters and real in the world they inhabit yet still carry other
meanings.

Cosmatos also finds room for some great, larger than life – because only
people larger than life can exist in this sort of dreamscape - performances
here. Riseborough’s presence is rather special. Even though the role of the
woman killed to induce a murderous rampage is usually an unthankful one, her
performance suggests a woman who found the sort of knowing innocence some, very
few people, reach after they have gone through some pretty horrible things, and
makes the cliché painfully real. Cage has by now developed actual control over
his personal style of overacting, where a decade or so ago it looked very much
as if it were the other way round (I sometimes imagine him possessed by a
crazier version of himself riding on his back). He is going big here, obviously,
but he’s going exactly as big as any given scene needs him to, an often
unrecognized art; he might be turning into Vincent Price in his old days.

If it’s not perfectly clear already, Mandy is a film that’s as if it
were exactly made to my personal specifications, therefore coming with the
warmest recommendation for any viewer that’s me.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

aka Treasured
aka NeverRealm
I assume Americans Bobby (Ryan Kelley) and Jewel (Madison McKinley) are the
winners of the price for “Worst Bankrobbers of the Year”, yet somehow, they
still have made it geographically far enough to rob a bank in Thailand. During
the course of said robbery, they scream, they shout, they shoot people for no
good reason, and they take two young Thai women – Winny (Priya Suandokemai) and
her best friend Earn (Air Phantila) – as hostages despite there being no reason
for taking hostages. They also don’t have an escape plan, so they hijack one
Chaow (Golf Pichaya Nitipaisankul) and his car. Somehow these idiots and their
hostages get away from Bangkok and into the countryside. There, a scuffle
between Winny and Bobby leads to a car crash, leaving everyone worse for wear
and the car out of commission.

Eventually, the bankrobbin’ fools and their hostages end up at an old
dilapidated mansion set. Here, things turn even worse, for besides the whole
“kidnapped by violent idiots” angle, the hostages and said violent idiots also
have to cope with some paranormal activity, as well as a plot twist. Spoilers
coming in.

See, all of the characters are in some kind of hell, going through violent
events to apparently be punished for a minor massacre they committed in the
1920s. Winny, who would be the final girl in most films, turns out to have been
the worst of them all. Alas, that twist really doesn’t work at all. Why would
hell put these 1920s people into a contemporary setting? Why do only the
Americans act murderous in this version of events? Even turning Winny from being
the most sympathetic character to the least sympathetic one doesn’t really
do much. Sure, it is somewhat surprising, but otherwise, it adds
nothing to the film and really doesn’t say anything about any of the characters,
turning the final fifteen minutes into a flabby growth with little point. Well,
thematically, we learn that killing people is bad, which will come as a complete
surprise to anyone watching I’m sure, so there’s that.

It’s unfortunate, too, for while Daric Gates’s film up until that point
wasn’t exactly the most interesting horror movie I’ve seen in the last couple of
days, it was at least effectively diverting, showing a decent, international
cast walking and running (and so on) through a really rather atmospherically lit
mansion set that was shot just as atmospherically by Tiwa Moeithaisong (who also
works as a director himself), while confronted by simple yet not completely
uninteresting supernatural threats. I’m tempted to say the Thai crew behind the
camera (this was shot in Malaysia and Thailand) did pretty good work while the
Western part of the production really let their side of the deal down.

If you can ignore the pointlessness of the final fifteen minutes and the
resulting lack of satisfaction, Realms is still an okay low budget
timewaster, mind you.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

After committing what we in the biz call “murder” on an already disarmed
suspect, a Jamaican cop going by the not exactly trustworthy sounding nickname
of Capone (Paul Campbell) – though to be fair he’s really more acting as if he
was called “Django” or “Dirty Harry” – is transferred back to a place where his
“shoot first, shoot second, then shoot again” approach to policing will be more
appreciated. Back to his home city of Kingston it is.

Before Capone has even had the possibility to visit his old haunts properly
and reintroduce himself to old friends from the time when he was running with
low level gangs like everybody else he knew, he stumbles unto parts of a large
gun smuggling operation. It’s not really clear what local gang boss One Hand
(Carl Bradshaw) needs quite as many guns for as he is smuggling in but it
obviously can’t be anything good.

Most troubling for Capone will be that his closest friend from way back when
– we’re basically talking brothers here –, a guy with the unfortunate moniker of
Ratty (Mark Danvers), is not just working for One Hand but may be as deeply
involved in the gun smuggling operations as possible.

As you may or may not know, Jamaica doesn’t have much of a film industry of
its own, so every film that’s made there, independent of style and genre, will
have to struggle through a lack of infrastructure, experienced crews and money.
In this context, it makes sense that Chris Browne’s crime action movie Third
World Cop was shot on digital at a time when that still wasn’t usual. Cheap
digital photography at the end of the last century did tend to look rather ugly,
unfortunately, so there’s really not much good to say about the film’s basic
look. It is, however, staged and blocked well, and certainly enhanced through
editing that makes the best of what’s there.

The action sequences are usually not terribly well realized either. There are
many shots of people either crouching behind something and shooting or standing
and shooting, with comparatively little actual movement that would make these
scenes dynamic. The editing picks up quite a bit of the slack here, but still,
if that were all the film had to offer, I’d probably say something patronizing
about it making the best out of what it has to work with, and leave the movie
be.

However, once the film has introduced its hero and his pretty cartoonish
cohorts (like his comedy colleague who only ever hides and calls for
reinforcements) and enemies, it actually starts doing interesting things with
them. I suspect a certain inspiration by Hong Kong cinema, but in any case,
Third World Cop turns into a – pleasantly melodramatic – tale of male
friendship complicated and betrayed that simply works on an emotional level and
even has something to say about poverty. Capone and Ratty’s relationship
actually starts to feel true, and certainly emotionally engaging. Browne builds
them up as believable friends who parted ways some time ago, and still feel
close but only half still know each other. They are also mirror images. One
can’t help but think that Capone is quite as desperate as he is to save Ratty
because he realized the only difference between Ratty and himself is that he
managed to get away from Kingston and street life and found an opportunity to
change (a little, he’s still a cowboy cop), while Ratty stayed behind and never
found any other way to deal with the poverty and violence dominating his
surroundings. If Capone hadn’t left Kingston, he might very well be the one
working for One Hand.

Where the digital set up the film has to work with doesn’t work out terribly
great for the action scenes, its documentarian, unadorned eye does wonders when
it comes to portray Kingston – not the parts of town where you’d meet any
tourists, mind you, but those where actual people live harsh lives. Most, if not
all of the exterior shots look as if they were made guerrilla style (or Browne
is absurdly brilliant at making them look that way), so there’s a very direct
sense of place to the film that gives its tale of gangsters and cops a feeling
of veracity a comparable Hollywood production wouldn’t be able to reach. I
wouldn’t exactly call it authenticity - there are still filmmakers making very
conscious artistic and commercial decisions here, after all – but it certainly
tries to come close to the actual spirit of its place.

For the music fans among us, it’s also rather nice to have a film featuring
various Jamaican musicians (for example Ninja Man and Elephant Man) in smaller
roles and with a soundtrack that’s produced by Sly & Robbie.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971): Four elderly ladies
(Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Mildred Natwick, Sylvia Sidney) create a completely
fictional young woman for a “computer dating club” to pass the time between
drinks. Alas, their imaginary girl attracts a budding serial killer (Vince
Edwards). This Ted Post-directed TV movie’s considerable entertainment value is
mostly gained through the merry interplay between its four elderly Hollywood
Stars, who clearly enjoy not having to play the standard roles women their age
have to put up with, and who do know a thing or three about comic timing. The
mystery plot itself isn’t particularly interesting, but Post does get quite a
bit of tension out of the contrast between his female stars’ companionable fun
and the killer’s well-written, downright creepy, whispered off-screen
monologue.

The Haunting of Sorority Row aka Deadly
Pledge (2007): Keeping with the TV movies, this Canadian Lifetime film
by Bert Kish, is on a quite lower level. A sorority pledge (Leighton Meester)
has to cope with an evil spirit that haunts her and her prospective
sisters because of a hazing ritual gone very badly wrong. Unfortunately, most of
the cast is pretty bad – the best performances here could be politely described
as “unremarkable” – the script has about one and a half decent ideas during the
whole running time, and director Kish shows no flair at all for staging spooky
scenes. However, I probably have to praise this one for being willing to go for
a much sillier and in your face finale than TV horror movies of its type usually
do. It’s too bad that silly and in your face don’t make this a decent movie
either.

Swiss Army Man (2016): We leave the world of TV far, far
behind with Dan Kwan’s and Daniel Scheinert’s extremely weird comedy about a man
(Paul Dano) stranded on a deserted island teaming up with a supremely useful and
increasingly communicative corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) to get back to
civilization. The first fifteen minutes or so are pretty insufferable, so
consciously tasteless I found it difficult to persevere with the film. I did,
however, and made my way through a tale that went from insufferable to moving to
philosophical to silly to stupid to creepy at a moment’s notice, leaving one
with the feeling that this thing is truly one of a kind. What at first looks
like a too self-conscious bizarro comedy turns into a film exploring the
vagaries of the male human heart through bizarre comedy and other things, while
keeping in mind there just might be something very wrong with said male human
heart, yet still never losing its compassion.

Friday, November 9, 2018

aka Ten Little IndiansThrough the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only
basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were
written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me
in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote
anymore anyhow.
Warning: this Soviet adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel uses the initial
title and version of the nursery rhyme that's so important for its plot, so if
you're afraid of that authentic period racism, this is not the adaptation for
you. I'll spare you the deeply problematic terminology in the review,
though.

Eight strangers - among them a retired judge (Vladimir Zeldin), a secretary
and governess (Tatyana Drubich), a former policeman (Aleksei Zharkov) and a
soldier/mercenary (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) - arrive at an isolated island
mansion (on what I shall call N-word Island). They all have been invited, each
guest for a different reason, by a certain U.N. Owen, a person quite unknown to
everyone. On the island, the group is awaited by a freshly hired couple of
servants (Aleksei Zolotnitsky and Irina Tershchenko), who have neither seen nor
heard their new employer. Supposedly, Owen has been held up on the mainland and
will join the party the next day.

Owen and his various promises to the various guests turn out to be lies once
dinner time arrives. A gramophone recording explains the sins of all ten guests;
everyone is responsible for the death of at least one other human being, and
everyone, the recording explains, is going to pay for their sins. Which is
exactly what happens: one after the other, the guests are killed in ways echoing
an old British nursery rhyme that just happens to be posted in everyone's room.
Soon, the guests realize they really are the only people on the island, so the
killer must be one of them. But who is it, and will they find out before
everyone's dead or broken by the situation?

I am, in general, not much of an admirer of the works of Agatha Christie. In
part, it's a problem I often have with the cozy subgenre - I just can't bring
myself to care if it was the butler or the young relative who killed Lord
Arsebutton for his money, and really, why should I? Christie's case is further
weakened by her love for perfectly annoying detectives (why isn't anyone
murdering Poirot and Miss Marple, for Cthulhu's sake?), her classism, and the
intensely improbable construction of many of her mysteries.

I do make an exception for novels like Ten Little N./Ten Little
Indians/And Then There Were None, though, because there is little
that is actually "cozy" about them - but who'd call a literary sub-genre the
"bleaky"? Ten (let's make it easy on ourselves with the title) is a
novel whose basic set-up has fascinated many a movie director, too, but some of
them have balked from giving the film its proper, grim
ending. Certainly not Soviet director Stanislav Govorukhin, whose Desyat
negrityat not just keeps all the uncomfortable elements of Christie's
original novel including its ending, but focuses on them to create the
psychologically dark period piece the novel deserves to be.

In Govorukhin's hands, the sometimes somewhat dry book turns into a
claustrophobic nightmare that at times feels like a horror film. The director
often uses consciously cramped framing - even in shots taking place outside the
house - to emphasize how the situation the murderer constructed for his victims
throws them back onto themselves, their guilt - even though not all of them
feel guilty, and this isn't a movie where a feeling of guilt saves
anyone from anything anyhow - and the pasts deeds whose consequences they can't
escape anymore, if they ever could or did. There's an incredible sense of
tension running through the movie that belies the surface talkiness of its
script (though Govorukhin knows quite well when to let his characters
stop talking, which becomes clear in the last stages of the film), the
seeming simplicity of Govorukhin's direction, and the film's length of 129
minutes. On paper, this might still sound like your typical cozy mystery plot,
but in practice, this is a film interested in, and awfully good at, exploring
the existential darkness inside of and around its characters. And, if we want to
give the film a political dimension instead of one sitting between philosophy
and psychology, can it be an accident that every character in the film - the
killer of killers being no exception - has at one point not just killed,
but killed by misusing a position of authority and trust?

The actors, especially Drubich and Kaydanovskiy, are fantastic, selling the
moments of naturalistic break-downs as well as those of heated melodrama. They -
and the script, of course - also manage to turn what could have been only a
series of vile people who get exactly what they deserve from somebody no
less vile who gets a friendly nod for it (let's call that the "Dexter hypocrisy
syndrome") into complex characters who have at one point in their lives given in
to weaknesses that - this seems to be a particularly important point for the
film - are universally human. These aren't all "bad" people, or "good" ones, or
"misunderstood" ones, but just people deserving of compassion even
though they have done horrible, or callous, or weak, things. Which, on the other
hand, doesn't mean Govorukhin is willing to pretend his characters are the sort
of people acting well under outside pressure.

The film's only weakness in my eyes lies in the construction of its plot, or
rather, how artificially constructed it is. There's a central plot point - and
we can thank Christie for that - that just beggars believe when you stop and
think about it for a second (and, to digress for a parenthesis, it is ironically
a plot point contemporary movies like the mildly diverting Saw series
seem to have fallen in love with wholesale), needing everyone still alive at a
particular moment to be outrageously dense or credulous, and the killer to be
extremely lucky and talented in the ways of the pulp yogi. However, Govorukhin's
direction is so strong I couldn't help but look with raised eyebrows at the
solution of the film's mystery, yet still be decidedly enthusiastic about the
film as a whole.

The mystery isn't the point of the film anyhow. Desyat Negrityat is
all about showing what made its characters what they are, and what they become.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Steph (Baranger Clark or Baranger Dean, depending if you go by the film’s
credits or everything else you can find about it online) and Jason (Freddie
Jarrett) apparently have been involved in running extreme haunted houses for
some time now. Particularly Jason is set on stopping to work as hired hands in
the business and really wants to build something all of their own. So it’s an
excellent coincidence when the Whitlow House comes up on the market just when
they are looking for a new place to live. The house has a genuine history of all
kinds of horrible shit happening in it following a witch burning a couple of
centuries earlier, so marketing it as a haunted house should practically work by
itself. All this, and they can live in it too! And hey, it’ll only cost them all
of their combined money, so whatever could go wrong?

Steph, clearly the sensible one of the pair, does take a bit of convincing,
but eventually, they go through with the plan, buy the place and move in. Alas,
the house is indeed haunted, and soon, Steph is plagued by strange dreams and
blackouts, and encounters a handful of paranormal phenomena. She very quickly
wants out, but Jason – in the tradition of horror film males all over the world
– is still set on keeping with the plan, even if his girlfriend is slowly going
insane.

Brendan Rudnicki’s and Joel Donovan’s Whitlow House is a nice little
surprise of an indie movie. It’s – as you’ve realized by now – not a terribly
original film, yet it is a nicely focussed affair that seems rather conscious of
the pitfalls of working on really low budgets. Well, its old spooky house
doesn’t look terribly old and spooky, but I’ll just put that down to the
budget.

Technically, this is a clean and effective effort – if you can ignore a sound
mix that isn’t always ideal – with more than decent acting particularly by Dean,
a script that doesn’t overstay its welcome or try to stretch the material it is
working with for longer than is possible, even if that means the resulting film
is only a lean 64 minutes long. I certainly prefer this approach to the kind of
indie horror that doesn’t seem to believe in edits or ending scenes before
doomsday.

Even though the scares will not exactly be new to experienced (or even
semi-experienced) horror viewers, they are well realized and do fit nicely
together. They really do seem to belong in the same thematic and stylistic
realm, making the film feel cut from one piece. The directors also avoid going
to the jump scare well again and again, instead putting the emphasis on the
increasingly strained relations between its central couple.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Nerdy Dax (Robbie Kay) is a giant horror fan. It’s something his mother
shared with him when he was little, and after she was murdered by your common
and garden masked maniac right in front of him, his fandom only got bigger.

Dax is planning to visit Blood Fest with his female best friend – and of
course secret love because movies just can’t do without it – Sam (Seychelle
Gabriel) and his other best friend Krill (Jacob Batalon). Blood Fest is a new
outdoors festival celebrating all things horror in mostly copyright friendly
ways. Unfortunately, Dax’s father (Tate Donovan), a TV psychologist, is set
against all things horror after the murder of his wife, making the genre
responsible for turning one of his own patients into a killer of psychologist
wives. Didn’t see that movie, myself. But even when Dear Dad destroys Dax’s
ticket to Blood Fest, our young hero manages to find a way in in form of his
kinda-sorta friend Ashley (Barbara Dunkelman), who is trying to make it in the
movies by having a relationship (cough) with some asshole horror director, so
she can provide.

Perhaps Dax’s Dad wasn’t completely wrong with his hatred and fear of horror
though, for it turns out, Blood Fest is all too real. The carnival huckster type
guy (director Owen Egerton) running the show has decided that modern horror has
become too watered down and needs an injection of reality. Which means public
murders of a captive audience of horror fans by his various mad science
experiments and a super slasher dressing rather a lot like the one who killed
Dax’s father. Of course, Dax, being the horror fan, knows all of the
genre rules and is therefore predestined to become the film’s hero. No idea why
all the other experts on these rules you’d encounter on this sort of festival
aren’t doing their part.

However, if you ignore this little problem with the film’s set-up, and the
fact ninety percent of its characters and their relations are pure cliché,
there’s still some – depending on one’s taste and patience even more - fun to be
had with Owen Egerton’s horror comedy. We’ve all gone through a lot of horror
comedies fixated on “THE RULES” in the decades after classic bad
influence Scream, so don’t expect every joke to be new to many in the
film’s expected audience of horror fans. There is still some good stuff in here
among the obvious jokes about the things you’d expect a film like this to joke
about, however.

Well, you also need to ignore how the way too self-indulgent
villain performance by the director (who is no Clint Eastwood) sometimes
threatens to take over the film for no good reason whenever we pop over to his
lair again so he can make lame jokes and explain how exactly he created his
zombies, etc, as if anyone in the audience cared.

But to the elements that actually make the whole thing worth watching without
having you cry about the loss of valuable time you could have spent cleaning out
your closet: the cast as a whole give fun performances, making the best out of
the flat characters they are dealing with and generally providing them with more
life than they strictly deserve, not exactly turning them into people but into
the kind of joke and monster death dispensers I don’t mind sharing some of my
lifetime with. The cast also makes quite a few of the script’s jokes and ideas
work through powers of comical timing that can transcend some of the
writing. And, to be fair, some of Egerton’s jokes are indeed funny, as are some
of his high concept ideas – I’m certainly rather fond of his non-Jason character
with the gardening gimmick, and the play with well-loved elements of Friday
the 13th Part II.

On the plotting side, Blood Fest is a homage-laden series of action
and horror set pieces, and while I’m not terribly impressed by Egerton as a
writer or as an actor, I certainly can’t fault him as a director of this type of
set piece. There’s beautiful artificial light in all the right colours, more
than enough fun blood and gore (also in all the right colours), there’s a feel
for the sets as physical locations. Even though I wasn’t exactly gasping in
excitement, the loud stuff is certainly the film’s strong suite.

There is one bit of writing in the film I liked quite a bit, too. It’s that
Egerton actually realizes making a horror film that poo-poos people who hate
horror but then puts them in the right when horror fandom does indeed lead to
mass murder and madness makes little sense at all, so he does something about
it. What he does (I’m not going to spoil it here for those who haven’t already
realized) isn’t overwhelmingly clever, nor was it terribly surprising to me, but
it certainly suggests more thought than some of the by the numbers elements of
the film otherwise suggest.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

When he sees a the picture of a disappeared kid on a milk carton,
and remembers having seen him one night in the home of his neighbour, the police
officer Wayne Mackey (Rich Sommer), conspiracy and weird shit obsessed teenager
Davey (Graham Verchere) becomes convinced Mackey is a serial killer.

Davey ropes in his trio of best friends to spy on Mackey, and really, what
happens then is – until the final five minutes – exactly the film you picture
now in your head, for Summer of 84’s director trio François Simard,
Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell seem to have set out to make the most
generic film in the sub-genre of post-Stranger Things 80s retro
fantastika humanly achievable. There is not a single character, not a plot beat
apart from the ending, no scene, nothing whatsoever in this movie that isn’t
desperately trying to demonstrate this is indeed a film made in the spirit of
1984. Unlike in Stranger Things there is nothing here beyond cloying
nostalgia and formal mimicry, no breath of air, not even a little distance to
the mores of the film’s time, and certainly no commentary on them (unlike in
films actually made in 1984). Worse, it’s the imitation of a film so generically
1984, nobody in 1984 would have shot it fearing its audience would get
bored.

Frankly, I don’t see what the point of the film is at all. Wallowing in
nostalgia for the depiction of not perfectly happy childhoods as seen in other
movies instead of trying to actually speak about these childhoods, not their
portrayal? Making a thriller where every single plot beat is so expected the
film might as well not exist beyond its basic idea? And why then end the film on
a note that’s absolutely one from a film made in 2018 but that doesn’t really
comment on what came before thematically? Perhaps the final couple of scenes are
meant to deconstruct the nostalgia Summer of 84 has been peddling for
ninety-five percent of its running time, but to do this effectively, it’s really
too little, too late, feeling more like a generic grimdark gesture than anything
of substance.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Welcome to a cyberpunky, corporate-owned future, where even the Pyramids have
an ad banner stuck on them. Former special forces badass Luke Gibson (Cuba
Gooding Jr.) has relaxed quite nicely into civilian life. His wife and he are
clearly happy, and a child’s going to pop any day now. Alas, their car is hit by
a truck, killing his wife and child. Because his insurance very suddenly
expires, things wouldn’t look terribly great for Luke’s survival either, but a
couple of corporate goons working for tech company high-up Virgil (Val “Doesn’t
give a shit” Kilmer) convince his surgeon to save our hero by hardwiring an
illegal experimental chip into his brain, as per the film’s title.

The procedure does indeed save Luke’s life, but he also loses large parts of
his memory and starts to see things that suggest the chip is beaming ads right
into his brain, a prospect that would most probably convince ad executives in
our world to break a few laws, too. Worse, there’s also a kill switch installed
that’ll blow up his head when he gets too uppity.

Fortunately, the mandatory semi-heroic group of hackers – tough yet avuncular
Hal (Michael Ironside!), his paraplegic hacker son Keyboard (Chad Krowchuk), and
the adorably named Punk Red (a pre-Orphan Black Tatiana Maslany) and
Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger) – hack into Luke’s brain to for some well-needed
ad-blocking and recruit him to their cause by showing him rage-inducing pictures
of the family he lost. Turns out a multinational corporation is no match for
badass Cuba Gooding Jr. and a couple of hackers with idiotic names.

Fun fact: I just love the direct to home video action movie phase of Cuba
Gooding Jr.’s career much more than most of what he did in his Oscar-baiting
time. As I have mentioned before, the wonderful thing about Gooding in this
context is that he doesn’t act like a guy who is slumming at all, but applies
his not inconsiderable talents fully to whatever bizarre crap the film at hand
asks of him. Consequently, Gooding plays the silly bits, the trite bits, and the
parts where he interacts with the horror of the ads beamed into his brain
totally serious, with admirable professionalism, really making much of what we
see doubly enjoyable. His performance – and those of the cast of fresh young
actors and low budget veteran aces like the always great Ironside – stand in
extreme contrast to Val Kilmer’s usual pay check grab. One could have put his
absurd wig onto a life-sized doll and put his dialogue through a computer and
have gotten the same performance for considerable less money. Fortunately,
Kilmer isn’t actually doing much, so his lazy diva crap isn’t doing too much
damage beyond adding one more embarrassment to a career that could have been
great.

Anyway, while the plot is obviously silly, there’s quite a bit more to enjoy
here than bashing Kilmer and watching Gooding and co. Director Ernie Barbarash
is certainly one of the more talented people working in the direct to your couch
action space, here as usual demonstrating a sense of pacing that’s good enough
to convince a viewer there’s more action happening in the movie than there
actually is. The action sequences that are there are indeed fine, mind you.

What’s most fun about the film – at least to me – is its somewhat early 80s
Corman-esque sense of sledgehammer satire. Luke’s brain ads are truly hilarious,
as are the branded landmarks in the intro and many another idea of the sort.
Plus, who doesn’t like a movie that’s so down on ads?

There’s also something to be said for the somewhat thrown together look of
Hardwired’s near future that mixes the mildly science fictional with
the grubbily contemporary as of its making, and a handful of dubious aesthetic
ideas, and probably ends up on a more realistic look for its future than the
completely designed one of a film with a budget would have been. After all,
whose outer reality consists exclusively out of objects made during the last two
or three years?

Saturday, November 3, 2018

He’s Out There (2018): I’m not usually someone beating
movies with the morality club, but when a film like Quinn Lasher’s He’s Out
There comes around and mostly wants to base its suspense on various
“children in danger” tropes, and never uses this as anything but an intensely
cheap way to try and get to its audience, it really deserves to be clubbed with
it. I’m not even against films exploiting the automatic sympathy most audiences
will have for children, but there really needs to be a reason to use this
particular element as enthusiastically as this thing does. Otherwise, it’s just
a cheap and unpleasant evening without much of a point. Apart from decent lead
performances by Yvonne Strahoski and the kid actresses Anna and Abigail
Pniowsky, there’s little else to recommend the film – it certainly has one of
the uglier colour schemes I’ve seen in quite some time, and a script that’s not
just heavy on the child exploitation angle but also on all grown-ups acting
exclusively like “it’s in the script” horror movie characters.

Powwow Highway (1989): Jonathan Wacks’s (UK produced!) film
about two Cheyenne (A Martinez and Gary Farmer) going on a road trip to get the
sister of one of them out of custody is a bit of a mixed bag. Shot and told in a
very typical late 80s indie style, it fluctuates between a somewhat abstracted
(the director certainly isn’t a Native American) anger about the way the US were
still treating people they’d beaten and betrayed again and again, some very
generic odd couple friendship stuff, and moments that actually remind more of
Burt Reynolds movies than anything else (only the characters’ car is crap). It’s
not a terribly coherent and concise film, even as road movies go, losing any
prospect of actually thinking any of its potential themes through early on and
mostly getting by on Wacks’s generally solid filmmaking and the performances of
Martinez and Farmer. The film also doesn’t seem to want to face the fact that
nothing its characters do in the end will change anything about them or their
lives at all, badly selling empty gestures as something profound.

Welcome the Stranger (2018): Finishing up this trio is this
one directed by Justin Kelly. A sister (Abbey Lee) suddenly appears at the house
of her brother (Caleb Landry Jones) whom she hasn’t seen for ages. Incestuous
tension rises and both siblings are plagued by visions and dreams. Some time,
the brother’s girlfriend (Riley Keough) appears, though she might be a figment
of his imagination, or the projection of something; or the sister might
try to bring him to share her own delusions. Apparently, closeness between
siblings isn’t what it’s generally made out to be.

The film is obviously influenced by David Lynch, but there’s also more than
just a suggestion of Ingmar Bergman in his least realistic mode. However, unlike
with Lynch, the film’s various strangenesses never add up to a feeling of real
disquiet, and where Bergman’s use of symbolism and the weird is incisive and
sharp yet still ambiguous, Kelly’s film never really dives that deep.

Friday, November 2, 2018

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only
basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were
written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me
in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote
anymore anyhow.

A number of meteors crashes onto a field belonging to a farm in Cornwall.
It's the most curious thing though - usually, meteors don't fly in a
V-formation. The UK government thinks the phenomenon requires investigation and
decides to send a group of scientists lead by an astronomer with a special
interest in the discovery of extraterrestrial life, Dr. Curtis Temple (Robert
Hutton), to Cornwall.

There is a tiny problem, though: Temple's love for vintage cars (slightly
prefiguring the Third Doctor, like some of the film's tone, if you ask me) has
resulted in an accident some months ago that left the astronomer with a silver
plate in his head, and - at least that's the opinion of his doctor - still too
sick to work away from home, even though he'll act as fit as James Bond
throughout the movie. We all know about the dangerous wilds of Cornwall, far
away from civilization, after all.

So there's nothing to it than to send Temple's colleague and girlfriend, Lee
Mason (Jennifer Jayne) to lead the expedition and send all pertinent data up to
Temple.

Alas, things at the crash site fastly become problematic. The meteorites
contain alien consciousnesses that take over the scientists, break off all
contact with the outside world and slowly begin to infiltrate a close-by village
too (starting with the local banker, of course, as if that were necessary).
Then, the aliens begin to requisition large amounts of building materials and
weapons through government channels.

After a time without news, Temple, as well as someone in government, realizes
that something's not right at all. An attempt by the aliens to take the
astronomer over too failing thanks to that practical silver plate helps Temple's
thought processes there. Temple's investigations in the village and around the
crash site turn up curious developments: it's not just that the scientists and
the dozens of people they have taken on are obviously not themselves anymore,
they have built an underground lair all the better to be able to shoot rockets
to the moon. Fortunately, Temple is one of those two-fisted scientists from the
50s, and his astonishing abilities (yeah, I know, he must have survived World
War II, but how many astronomers really were astonishing commandos and still
were when they hit middle-age?) at fistfighting, shooting, and escaping from
cells will be very helpful in thwarting the plans of the aliens and their leader
- the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough). Not even a strange alien illness that
is also part of the aliens' overcomplicated plan can touch Temple; I suspect the
illness is afraid to be infected by Hutton's well-known right-wing real life
opinions about everything.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make a 50s alien invasion movie in
1967. This time around, much-kicked – when it comes to non-anthology movies
- Hammer rivals Amicus are throwing their shoestring budget at that old stalwart
of British cinema, the alien invasion movie with the American no-name actor in
the lead role. One suspects Quatermass and the Pit might have had
something to do with that decision, though They Came counters the
complexity and intelligence of the Quatermass approach to SF with a tale of a
properly dumb alien invasion with a badly delivered 60s peace and love twist at
the end that wants me to believe that the two-fisted American scientist whose
adventures we have witnessed up to the point is willing to shake hands with
aliens who wanted to kill him or make him their slave because they say they now
think better of it - twice. Let's not even talk about these aliens' idea of
secrecy (or the idea of the film's UK government about how a quarantine works;
hint: generally, letting people come and go as they please isn't a part of
it).

This may sound as if I were rather dissatisfied with They Came, but
nothing could be further from the truth. The alien invasion plot may be dumb, it
is however dumb in the most delightful manner, easily convincing me that I may
not live in a world where this sort of plan would sound logical, but really
rather would. Not only are the aliens' plans and the film's hero - who reminds
me of a more conservative version of one of these non-professional Eurospy movie
protagonists - a delightfully groovy age version of 50s traditions (a total
improvement on the model, obviously), the way to thwart them is just as
beautifully insane, seeing as it consists of knocking one's possessed girlfriend
out, kidnapping her, and using her as a test object while working on a (of
course very silly looking) anti-alien-possession helmet, even sillier alien
detection goggles and alien re-possession methods with a friendly scientist (Zia
Mohyeddin) who just happens to live somewhere in the country close-by, and also
owns many silver trophies and as well as utilities to melt metal. In an
especially pleasant development that helpful man is a Pakistani Englishman, who
is not played as a comical figure, doesn't have to die to prove how evil the bad
guys are, and will turn out to be save-the-day-competent. Given his role, and
how competent Lee is allowed to be once she's not under alien control anymore,
it's pretty obvious this is a film that may love to indulge in silliness for
silliness' sake but that also has a clear idea of which parts of his 50s models
just don't cut it anymore in 1967.

When people - though too few of them do - talk about They Came's
special effects, they unfailingly mention their quality to be comparable to
contemporary Doctor Who (this was the time of the Second Doctor Patrick
Troughton, if you're not quite up on important historical dates). That's an old
chestnut when talking about British SF cinema, yet in this case it is indeed
true. Consequently, the effects' execution has more than just a whiff of
cardboard and spit, but it also shares the other, more important part of the
Doctor's legacy, a decidedly British visual imagination that makes up for the
unavoidable cheapness and threadbareness. My favourite set piece is the yellow
and black striped elevator that sits right inside a typical British country
home, exemplifying at once the loving absurdity and the Britishness (for wont of
a better word) of the film's production design. It's the mix of the local and
the strange that gets me every time.

What the Doctor generally didn't have at the time (though the show
did have some good ones) were directors quite like They Came's
Freddie Francis. Francis, veteran that he was, was someone seemingly unable to
not put real effort even into his cheapest and silliest films, and he works his
magic here too, milking every possibility to turn the cheap yet creative sets
and the landscape of the locations into a cheap pop art dream that feels
saturated with colours even when the surroundings are rather brown more often
than not, and that builds visual interest even from the smallest thing.

The movie's pop art feel is even further strengthened by James Stevens's
score that belongs to the jazzy swinging kind you often find in Eurospy movies,
though it has a peculiar habit to just fall into an unending series of drum
rolls when Hutton punches people in the face.

The cheap pop art feel of, well, everything about They Came From Beyond
Space suggests a film made to treat the old-fashioned tropes of the 50s
alien invasion movie with the sensibilities that produced the Eurospy movie. In
a wonderful turn of event, Francis's movie actually succeeds at that mission,
for words like "groovy" and "awesome" come to my mind quite naturally when I
think about it.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

After a research project to “cure sleep” with some magical drug ends with the
death of one of its subjects via eye mutilation and suicide, the medical – or
pharmaceutical, the script neither tells nor has probably thought about it –
researcher responsible (Yasmine Aker) convinces her grad students (Brea Grant,
Keli Price, Stephen Ellis, and Christine Dwyer) to continue the experiment on a
long weekend. After all, once they have reached 200 hours without sleep, they
will reach a state of lucidity and will be feted as heroes of humanity
everywhere, right? Of course, everyone involved quickly develops horrible
hallucination, and starts to see a foggy CGI monster, while also suffering from
various other psychological problems you might imagine to occur with
drug-induced sleep deprivation.

There is, by the way, no connection to L.T.C. Rolt here, if you were asking
yourself that. I rather enjoyed director Phillip Guzman’s previous film,
Dead Awake, and I sort of dig the sleep themed horror thing he has
going on, but the film at hand is pretty atrocious. It’s not so much Guzman’s
direction – though the decision to show a CGI monster this crappy quite this
often, as well as how the tonal shifts in the acting present don’t do the film
any favours either and are certainly in the purview of the director’s job – but
rather a script that gets basically nothing right apart from the cool, old
school fantastika idea of dream-eating monsters living in symbiotic relationship
with humanity until a couple of idiots decide to “cure sleep”.

The characterisation is broad and empty where depth and detail are needed for
the story to have any effect on its viewers, and the tone shifts between awkward
comedy and supposedly deadly serious horror at a moment’s notice. The actors
seem to have been left without any guidance, so only Aker – who doesn’t have to
go through these shifts – and eternal pro Grant actually seem to have any kind
of grip on their respective characters. The rest of the cast wobbles and
stumbles through the series of disconnected moments that goes for a plot here.
The film’s basic problem is the complete absence of actual definition in
characters and world, which is rather a heavy lack in a film all about horror
based on the psychology and perceptions of its characters.

For some reason, this is also set in the 80s, so these aren’t just
unconvincing characters, but also ones dressed up in “period” costumes who look
exactly like that – costumed.

That Sleep No More’s idea of how medical research works, what a
control group is and what it is there for, and so on, and so forth, has little
base in even the most cursory research made by the writers seems to be par for
the course for this sort of thing; that most of its deviations from reality –
which make Flatliners look scientific – aren’t even useful in building
drama, adds insult to injury.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Somewhere in the Mexican countryside in the 19th Century, or thereabouts. The
area is plagued by a series of horrible murders. Victims are found in terrible
states – mutilated and without a drop of blood in their veins. The local police
seems to have their suspicions about Selma Jaramillo (Rita Macedo), a widow
apparently living completely alone in a huge, intensely creepy mansion in the
middle of nowhere, being involved somehow, but thus far, there’s no actual
evidence beyond the woman acting rather off-handedly, perhaps even a
bit gleeful, about all the murders in her direct neighbourhood. We the audience
know these suspicions about her are indeed well-founded, for the film’s first
scene sees Selma – though with disturbing shark eyes in her face – her dogs and
her scarred henchman Juan (Carlos López Moctezuma) making brutal work of some
travellers.

Tonight is going to be special night in Selma’s house of horrors. After
fifteen years during which she has kept the girl away, she has invited her niece
Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her in the house; she has a bit of a nasty
surprise waiting as the young woman’s present for her 25th birthday. Amelia also
brings a surprise of her own – she is freshly married to the cigar-chomping
Jaime (Abel Salazar).

Amelia and Jaime quickly understand that something is very wrong with Selma
and her house. A single servant the woman says she’s cut from the gallows and
who certainly looks the part, mysterious cries in the house and an unpleasant
vision in a mirror are the sort of things that’ll get guests into an ominous
mood. And that’s before Selma reveals the horrible truth about their family to
Amelia – they are the descendants of La Llorona (which in this version of the
legend was an evil, powerful, bloodsucking witch), fated to become just like
her. Amelia, says Selma, is cursed to bring La Llorona herself back to life by
removing the pike she had been staked with when a bell that hasn’t tolled in
ages will strike midnight. Worse still for the young woman, she too will become
an evil, bloodsucking fiend, while Jaime, like apparently all men marrying into
her bloodline, is doomed to madness.

While Amelia is more than just a little disturbed by all this, Selma is all
too happy with her project. After all, following in her ancestor’s (or mother’s,
the film isn’t terribly clear about it) footsteps has brought her considerable
power and agelessness already; she expects nothing less than “omnipotence” once
La Llorona lives again.

As most Mexican genre directors of his era, Rafael Baledón made a huge number
of films in all kinds of genres, and as normal for everyone whose output is
quite as humongous as his was – I speak from practical experience here – not
every single film he worked on was a masterpiece; some were indeed rather bad.
However, his best films – and I have by now seen more than a couple that deserve
this description – could be outright brilliant.

La maldición certainly is brilliant, as great a Gothic horror film
as anything the Italians or Corman made around this time, breathing the mood of
bad dreams and cruel fates. Where most Mexican Gothic horror on screen seems to
have come to the genre mostly by way of the Universal school (with more or less
hefty pulpy elements added to the mix), this entry shows some clear influences
by Bava, Black Sunday specifically. Particularly the beginning scenes,
the shot of Selma, shark-eyed, surrounded by her attack dogs, and the whole look
of the set dominated by broken trees they take place in suggest the iconic shot
of Barbara Steele surrounded by her dogs, and the coach sequence at the
beginning of Bava’s masterpiece. There are some plot parallels too, but
Baledón’s film takes these elements in directions too much of its own for the
film ever to become a rip-off.

Baledón’s direction may not be quite on the level of Bava at his best here,
yet the film is still full of the mood of dreams and nightmare imagery, putting
its characters into a place perpetually dominated by fog and nature that looks
broken, twisted and corrupted, trapping them in a house whose series of secret
passages and elegantly placed giant spider webs, its stairs leading who knows
where suggest the subconscious mind much more than an actual house people would
inhabit. The performances fit these places, particularly Macedo playing her
Selma much larger than life. But then, how else would you portray the character
of a potentially immortal, bloodsucking witch trying to push her niece into
fulfilling the family curse?

Apart from the sometimes expressionist sets and camera work suggestive of the
otherworldly and the strange, Baledón also has some simple, and brilliant ideas
that make the film stranger in all the best ways. Take for example, the scene
where Amelia – well on her way to turning evil herself – has a crisis of
conscience, and the night sky above her suddenly fills with (animated) eyes; or
the one where Selma exposits some of the family history to a hypnotized Jaime
but all we see of the flashbacks (which look like scenes from other Mexican
horror films as far as I could make out) is in negative form, turning what could
be hokey cost-cutting peculiarly disquieting.

Thematically, this is a film very much about an obsession of Gothic
literature and cinema (and sometimes weird fiction following it, too, see
Lovecraft): the fear of inheritance as a form of fated doom, be it biological
inheritance, spiritual inheritance, or a philosophical one, very close to
the idea of free will being a mere illusion. Interestingly enough for a Mexican
horror film - whose solutions to this sort of conundrum, this being a very
Catholic country, usually involve religion or masked wrestlers – this particular
horror here is averted by the very earthly love between a husband and a wife,
the climax finding Jaime – not at all like a proper macho but rather like a real
man – pulling Amelia back from the abyss by pleading with her and declaring his
love. Well, he does get to punch Juan afterwards too, but that’s really more an
epilogue to help the audience cope with Jaime’s general lack of fighting skill,
as is the traditional – and impressive - breakdown of the house where everything
took place.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

One exhausted evening, college student Hee-jin (Nam Sang-mi) gets a call from
her mother (Kim Bo-yun) reporting her sister So-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) has
disappeared. Hee-jin returns home at once. To her shock, she finds her mother
hasn’t called the police about the disappearance yet; dear mother, in the grip
of full-on religious mania for what we will later learn quite some time now,
really rather wants to pray the kid back.

Of course, once Hee-jin calls the police, she isn’t exactly impressed by the
detective she’s speaking with, Tae-hwan (Ryu Seung-ryong). He’s basically
shrugging things off by explaining the 14 year-old’s disappearance with her
“simply” having run away. Therefore, there’s supposed to be no reason for
concern or for the policeman doing his job. However, Tae-hwan will change his
tune once a series of strange and disturbing events begin to develop, like a
number of suicides in rather quick succession, all taking place in the apartment
house Hee-jin’s mother and sister live in. The first woman who kills herself
apologizes to So-jin for something in her suicide note, though neither mother
nor daughter seem to know what her connection to Hee-jin was apart from having
babysat her sometimes. Tae-hwan’s and Hee-jin’s – sometimes independent,
sometimes not – investigations turn up increasingly disturbing connections
between these people and So-jin.

What these connections in Lee Yong-joo-I’s Living Death exactly are,
I’m not going to disclose; I am only going to say that this is one of those
horror films where most people getting supernaturally killed off pretty much get
what they asked for. Yet, it isn’t the sort of straightforward supernatural tale
of vengeance one might expect, for Lee structures the story and its telling very
much like a traditional mystery interspersing the investigative sequences with
highly effective and often properly disturbing scenes of horror of ever
increasing intensity. So this is less a tale of supernatural revenge than that
of a young woman and a cop with problems trying to figure out the truth through
proper investigations, with interviews and research revealing ever more of the
truth of what has been going on around So-jin.

Or really, half revealing that truth, for as many a South Korean horror film,
Living Death keeps certain things ambiguous, ending on a note that can
be easily read in a couple of very different ways. Which is only right and
proper for a film whose characters have very different interpretations on the
same set of occurrences and facts, depending on their personal connection to
things as well as their religious and spiritual outlook.

Thematically, the film is concerned with the love of family and the sometimes
disturbing forms it can take, the horrors of religious world views, the
willingness of people to egotistically use others, guilt, and the way fact is
always filtered through any given person’s view of the world. It’s pretty heady
stuff, at least on paper. In Lee’s hands, however, all these ideas and
perspectives come together to form a highly coherent, intelligent film that asks
questions and expects its audience to come up with their own answers. It’s also
a film that happens to be a fascinating tale of mystery as well as a character
based piece of horror that finds its most terrible moments not in the
supernatural (though it is certainly no slouch in that regard) but in the human
reaction to it.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

aka Halloween Night
Apart from giving away lots of pumpkins for Halloween, dear old Grandpa (Hy
Pyke) is not-so-secretly the big boss of a Satanic cult working in one of those
typical US small towns that are always full of satanists, monsters, and the
murderously deranged. Grandpa has his favourite grandkid Tommy (Bryson Gerard)
pegged as somebody very special for the future service of His Satanic Majesty.
Indeed, he’s so special Grandpa does take it upon himself to murder Tommy’s dad,
probably to make himself the best bet for a father figure.

Years later – Tommy is now played by Gregory Scott Cummins – Tommy’s
indoctrination has gone apace, even though his mother – Grandpa’s very own
daughter! – tries to keep her son as well as his siblings Vera (Carla Baron) and
Roger (Jeff Brown) as far away from the old man as possible. Which, given that
Tommy’s the product of a bit of incest between Gramps and his daughter whom he
hypnotized into it on her wedding day, must take quite some doing.

This Halloween, Tommy’s initiation phase is finally going to be over, if,
that is, he manages to keep “pure” for it. Satan must secretly be a no sex
before marriage to him guy, I assume. Fortunately for Tommy, somebody in an
inspired robes and devil mask outfit murders his girlfriend before she can suck
out his spiritual energy, or something. This being a slasher film, robes and
mask murders will continue throughout the movie. Who is the killer? Crazy
Grandpa? Tommy taking time out from body building and fantasizing a whole video
clip of a inspired crap hair metal band featuring him on guitar? Somebody
else?

Whereas I diagnosed future softcore specialist Jag Mundhra’s previous horror
film Open House, as some kind of softcore sex film, just
without the sex (and therefore as pointless as anything),
Hack-O-Lantern (which is clearly the better because the much more
ridiculous title for this epic) is indeed an authentic late 80s direct to video
slasher. That’s to say it is nonsensical, ridiculous, from time to time
tasteless, mind-boggling, and frequently (inadvertently) very, very funny.

The plot, such as it is, the killer, their motive, the Satanic cult – take
whatever you want in this movie, and it’s going to make no sense whatsoever to
you, yet do so in a highly absurd and entertaining manner. I am particularly
fond of the film’s randomness: there’s nothing that’ll make a film more awesome
for less effort than a random video clip for some bad band disguised as a dream
sequence including some “sexy” dancing, and really nothing that could have less
of a point.

Then there’s Mundhra’s inspired hand for the silly detail. Who wouldn’t love
Grandpa’s pumpkin delivering ways, or the fact that everybody seems to know
where his cult does its thing, apart from anyone in any position to care about
it? And just see how lovely these Satanic rituals are, with the red robed evil
doers slowly stepping in a circle around a pentagram while Grandpa babbles
nonsense!

Speaking of Grandpa, a huge part of the responsibility for the high
entertainment value of Hack-O-Lantern sits on the shoulders of Hy Pyke,
his Southern drawl, his various versions of the devil horns and the evil eye
sign that emphasise about every third sentence he says, as well as the insane
enthusiasm of his scenery chewing that visibly leaves many of the other actors
unable to react in any way, shape or form. So most of his appearances consist of
him mugging and declaiming outrageously while his so-called co-actors just stare
helplessly, unable to come up with any way to relate to whatever the hell it is
he is doing; and they surely can’t expect Mundhra to step in and instruct them,
he’s busy enough keeping everyone in frame.

It’s quite the thing to witness, and while Hack-O-Lantern is
certainly not a Halloween classic, it is very, very, good at being not so
classic.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Incidente aka Incident (2010): On paper,
this piece of POV horror by Argentinian director Mariano Cattaneo sounds pretty
awful: a couple of documentarians (whose camera wielding half apparently can’t
frame a shot decently to save his life) examining the occult connections of a
spree killing of years past and some occultist academics awaken a rather
possessive evil; lots of running around of people in various states of
possession through a dilapidated industrial building ensues. In practice, and
despite the much too shaky camera work, Cattaneo somehow turns this thin bit of
plot into an entertaining 80 minutes of film, by what I can only imagine to be
sheer willpower. The make-up effects are rather impressive for the film’s budget
league, but what really makes this work as decently as it does is a proper sense
of mood and pacing, I just wish it had been put to use on a more interesting
story, though I do give the film some extra bonus points for its use of actual
occult concepts in its backstory.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018): While I enjoyed
the first film in what is now apparently a franchise more than this sequel,
Stephen Cognetti’s attempt at broadening his haunted house tale towards a more
concrete mythology of its own still ends up being a perfectly entertaining
little movie featuring some actually thoughtful retconning of elements of the
first film, and quite a few scenes that are effectively creepy. Like Cattaneo,
Cognetti also understands the importance of mood and pacing for this sort of low
budget affair, so there’s none of the feet dragging that can mar indie horror,
and a clear sense of purpose to everything we see and hear.

Heilstätten (2018): And here’s yet another POV horror film,
this time around from my native Germany, directed by Michael David Pate. Bottom
feeding Youtube “personalities” break into a former hospital complex with a very
bad past (this is Germany after all). The expected mixture of romantic travails
and supernatural and/or slasheriffic violence ensues, as does a double plot
twist that doesn’t work terribly well but certainly isn’t boring.

And really, while there’s nothing terribly exciting about
Heilstätten apart from it being yet another horror movie from Germany
that isn’t just amateur gore hour (though it features some pretty well done bits
of the icky stuff as well) or an arthouse flick, it works well throughout, keeps
its pace up, takes care to make its characters less loathsome than you’d expect,
and seems generally made by people who care about entertaining their audience. I
certainly felt moved accordingly for most of the film’s 90 minutes.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only
basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were
written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me
in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote
anymore anyhow.

The death of her abusive mother brings Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) back to the
family home she and her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) thought to have left behind
for good. Annie's even less happy with going back than Nichole, and only some
fine sisterly pressure convinces her to return at all, and much later than
Nichole does.

When Annie arrives "home", Nichole has disappeared into thin air after - as
the audience knows - some rather disquieting things happening to her. Annie
assumes Nichole, with her history of drug use and disappearing acts, has just
fallen back into old habits, leaving her sister alone to deal with a house and a
funeral she only thought of going to for her sister's sake, and her cousin Liz
(Kathleen Rose Perkins) to take care of her little daughter Eva (Dakota
Bright).

But when Annie meets Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her niece at her mother's funeral, she isn't quite as convinced of Nichole's
disappearance having a comparatively harmless explanation anymore. Liz argues
Nichole would never have left her daughter alone this way; after all she has
turned her life around for her.
Because Annie is more than a bit freaked out about staying at her mother's
place alone for another night, she invites Liz and Eva to stay the night with
her. After dark, everyone is woken by strange noises, and now it is Liz's turn
to disappear while Annie has an encounter with an invisible force that can only
be explained by supernatural agency. She barely manages to get out of the house
with Eva before whatever happened to Nichole and Liz can happen to her too.

When Annie goes to the police with her story, the part about poltergeist
phenomena does not exactly improve her chances for being taken seriously about
anything else she says. Only Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a cop who knew
Nichole - and one suspects also knows something about the family history - is
willing to actually listen to her. Creek isn't willing to believe in
any of that spooky stuff, but at least, he's still taking Annie seriously enough
to help her in the few ways actually in his power. However, if Annie wants to
find out where her sister and her cousin went, and what is haunting her mother's
house, she will have to do most of the investigating alone, with a messed-up
sensitive named Stevie (Haley Hudson) she knows from her high school pointing
the way. Annie might just find some terrible family secret hidden nearly in
plain sight.

Say what you will about (or against) the last decade in horror movies, but it
has - probably via the successes of Japanese cinema in this regard - brought
about a minor renaissance in movies about hauntings and ghosts, some of which,
like Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact, can stand their ground next to any
movie in that particular sub-genre you'd care to mention.

The Pact is a brilliant example of a movie closely concentrated on
creating a mood of dread and fear very close to the kind of fears I remember too
well from my own childhood. The movie manages to create a feeling of tension
even though it isn't a permanent barrage of Completely Shocking Things™. There
are some truly shocking and some truly creepy things happening
throughout the movie, but there's never the feeling any of them are in the movie
because it needs to include a shock every ten minutes. Rather, everything here
happens for a reason closely related to the film's plot and the film's mood, two
elements as organically entwined as possible.

McCarthy's direction is very stylish (the Internet tells me of Argento but
also Val Lewton productions as an influence, and I believe her in this case),
yet he never gets too flashy. McCarthy instead opts to put his stylistic
abilities exclusively into the service of creating the film's particular brand
of tension. For most of the time, the camera glides through the cramped and
claustrophobic spaces of Annie's mother's house, looking over Annie's shoulder,
lingering on blackness and the place's quotidian and bleak interior until they
become threatening in their near normality.

I also love how willing McCarthy (also responsible for the script) is to not
outright state a lot of what is going on with his characters and their lives but
to subtly show it through details of the interiors they move through and Caity
Lotz's body language (insert gushing praise about Lotz's performance here). It's
not that the film is vague about anything, The Pact is just not the
kind of film feeling the need to spell everything out an attentive audience will
understand in other ways.

It's all part of the film's overall spirit of tightness and concentration,
virtues it doesn't even leave behind when its plot later on takes a turn towards
a somewhat different type of horror film than it initially seemed to be,
fortunately without doing the boring "look at this surprising twist!" routine.
What could have been flabby and digressive in less capable hands feels organic
and logical here.

Finally, it's also worth mentioning - seeing as this is a horror movie - how
creepy the film is throughout, how successful The Pact is at combining
Annie's struggle with her past (her own childhood fears), the idea that however
horrible one's past was, there might always have been something more horrible
lurking unseen just a (literally and metaphorically) thin wall apart, and the
more general images of childhood fears it conjures up in pictures that seem
archetypally effective - and willing to be strange if it suits the film - to
me.

That, dear reader, means I was freaked out more than once during the course
of The Pact, which is the sort of compliment I can't give many horror
films.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

It’s Halloween in small town USA, 1989. Best friends Sam (Mitchell Musolino)
and Josh (Will Stout) are just about to graduate high school. But before they
let go of supposedly childish things like Sam’s absolute obsession with the best
of all holidays – he’s even got his own interpretation of the Rules of Halloween
– they are going to have a real proper Halloween with their other friends by
riding out of town for the big concert of their favourite band, Death Inferno.
Perhaps Josh can push Sam into finally romancing long time crush Michelle (Lexi
Dripps), too?

Alas, the kids will never actually arrive at their concert a couple towns
over, for on their way, they accidentally end up in front of the barn all local
Halloween legends talk about. Apparently, if you knock on the barn door three
times and shout “Trick or Treat!”, you’ll awaken a trio of murderous monsters
that’s a bit like the Halloween version of the village people – a miner, a
scarecrow, and a guy with a pumpkin head with flaming eyes. Because they are
kids in a horror movie, and because Josh clearly thinks it’ll get Sam over some
of his personal hang-ups, our group of protagonists does exactly that, and will
end up paying rather dearly in the ensuing triple slasher rampage. However,
it’ll turn out that Sam’s and Josh’s experience in gardening will be extremely
useful in a monster fight.

Justin M. Seaman’s The Barn is a piece of throwback horror from
beginning to end, so if the idea of a film quite this consciously using the
style of late 80s US low budget horror, even going so far as to use filters to
make the thing look more like the films it adores, sends you into some kind of
anti-retro panic, this is not the film for you. I’m generally a bit on the fence
about retroism taken quite this far, but I quickly found myself charmed and
entertained by the film, and once the scene that can only be called “The
Halloween Hoedown Massacre” came around, there was no thought about complaining
about the film being retro anymore, for it is delightfully so.

What I particularly enjoyed about the whole affair is how much The
Barn embraces the silly and goofy sides of the films it so clearly has been
inspired by, showing as little shame as its role models when it comes to seek
reasons to show off wonderfully gloopy gore effects, and as much moody red and
blue lighting as anyone could ever have wished for. This is the sort of film
that late in the game decides that three supernatural killers alone just aren’t
quite enough, so it adds a Satanic cult to the fold. And because Seaman and
cohorts apparently know what’s fun about Satanic cults in the sort of film they
are making, it indeed ends up as a nice addition to the rest of the wonderfully
weird crap going on here.

All of this would be enough to result in a perfectly good time for me, but
The Barn also works rather well in its more down to earth moments,
particularly in its first third. While the film certainly works with clichés
when it comes to its characters, particularly Sam and Josh’s
friendship still rings true to what I know of a certain type of close friendship
between boys in a small town, and actually feels quite a bit better developed
than comparable relationships would have been in many late 80s horror films.
Michelle’s and Sam’s relationship, while also a movie cliché, works on a
comparative level, too. These more naturalistic elements do of course wonders
when it comes to selling all the crazy and outrageous bits of the film, and
really hold together what otherwise could have been a fun series of gory
episodes more than an actual movie, while still leaving the filmmakers enough
space to just make up crazy entertaining shit.

Of course, there are a couple of weaknesses: the acting is not always as
strong as it could be (a problem The Barn obviously shares with it
spiritual predecessors), and the second act could probably have been tightened a
bit. However, when it comes to fun throw back horror like this, these aren’t
exactly insurmountable obstacles to enjoyment, and indeed, if you want to see a
very specifically old-fashioned fun horror movie instead of the bleak
and slow stuff I so often champion in contemporary horror, The
Barn should hit the spot very nicely indeed.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

It’s the ending stretch of World War I. A British desk jockey trying to get
his piece of glory before it’s too late manages to convince his superiors to
send him and a small group of soldiers to investigate a hidden underground
complex the Germans just fled. He suspects it to be the secret lab of German mad
scientist Reiner (Robert Stadlober), also known as “The Prophet”.

He’s all too right about that, and soon the mixed group of Brits, Americans
and PTSD-struck Canadian tunnel expert Berton (Rossif Sutherland) has to survive
the products of Reiner’s experiments, which look and sound like rather icky
worm-induced rage zombies. To make a bad situation worse, the German high
command has sent the surprisingly sane Hauptmann (whom the IMDB lists as
a “Kapitän”, which would be a sea captain) Müller (Shaun Benson) with a team of
men as well as Reiner himself back to the laboratory to purge the place. Still
worse for everyone’s potential survival is the little fact that Reiner really is
a bit of a prophet in that he’s very much foreseeing the spirit of Hitler and
would really rather let the world be destroyed by his worm zombies, Germany
potentially rising from the flames “purged of all weakness”, and so on and so
forth.

German zombie-style infected in a bunker, you say? I believe I’ve seen a
couple of films in this particular sub-genre of the Nazi zombie film before. In
theory, the setting of Leo Scherman’s Trench 11 during World War I
could differentiate it a bit from other films it does rather remind one of, but
in practice, it doesn’t make much of a difference if a German zombie soldier in
a low budget film is a Nazi or not, particularly since zombie creator Reiner is
very much written to embody the spirit of Nazism, while Benson’s Müller is that
well-worn trope of the basically decent German soldier (who just happens to
guard a KZ, but didn’t notice anything untoward, no sir, but I digress into
directions this film really isn’t responsible for). So, the big difference
between this and other bunker zombie films really only is the choice
of uniforms. Originality, you gotta seek elsewhere.

However, Scherman’s film has more than enough going on in it to recommend
itself for a day when one is in the mood for the unsurprising. For one, the
script is pretty tight, with simply yet effectively drawn characters acting in
ways that make sense for them while still hitting all the mandated plot beats of
the sub-genre they are moving in. The cast is doing a good job with them, too,
Sutherland and Benson making an effective duo of heroes, and Stadlober putting
in a very fun bit of Nazi scientist scenery chewing containing just the right
mix of foaming at the mouth and companionably crazy calm right before he does
something really nasty.

As a native German speaker, I was rather impressed – that “Kapitän” excepted
– by the general idiomatic correctness of the German here (though I’m not
completely convinced it’s actually idiomatic for the time this is taking place
in too). The German dialogue consists of sentences actual Germans would say, not
something you’ll get in many movies, not even German ones. The delivery of the
German parts of the dialogue (Stadlober obviously excepted), in somewhat ironic
contrast, is much less convincing, not only suggesting actors who are rather
more Canadian than your typical German language speaker but who also learned
their dialogue phonetically.

While neither sets nor direction are exactly exciting, there’s solid,
dependable craftsmanship visible throughout the film, as well as a decent sense
of place. It’s never a deep movie, exactly, but it’s also not goofy or playful,
treating its plot straight and working well enough with it.

The worm zombies and other effects are rather successful and certainly
unappetizing creations, the creatures basically bloated to bursting with their
parasites, which provides a handful of neat frissons of body horror.

As a whole, this might not be a remarkable or deep film, but it is solid and
dependable entertainment that’ll not leave you feeling more stupid going out
than you did when you came in.